Effect of Cross-Cultural Environment on People's Job Satisfaction in Foreign Invested Real Estate Companies in China

As China join into the WTO for over 10 years, increasing number of foreign investors show their interests in Chinese market, as well as foreign property companies.However, due to the cultural differences between foreign and local companies, the foreign investor will face with many challenges when entering into Chinese market. These challenges may lead to difficulties not only in establishing relationships with government offices, customers, labor and suppliers but also in managing local staff.While more and more employees working in foreign real estate companies now, it is not clear whether they feel live up to their expectations. Previous research show that cross-cultural environment in real estate industry has drawn much attention， although some influence of cross-culture was concluded, how people's job satisfaction would be affected under the cross-cultural environment in foreign real estate companies is not examined. In this paper, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are taken as the main research method. The quantitative questionnaire is designed by taking reference of previous researchers' suggestion and incorporating a number of existing scales for the measurement. A pilot study will be firstly conducted in Guangdong province in China. Respondents will be invited to provide feedback on the design of the questionnaire and suggestions for refining the survey instruments. After that, the reliability and validity of the instrument will be examined. In addition, according to the suggestions from the respondents in pilot study, revision will be made to refine the questionnaire for the main survey. And then is the main survey, Shanghai will be chosen as the main sample area due to the distribution of foreign property companies in China. Questionnaire will be delivered to at least 200 respondents in foreign companies and collected back immediately after they complete. Same number of questionnaire will be sent to local companies to collect control data. And if possible, some experienced managers will be asked to do interview.To find out whether cross-cultural environment has an effect on employees' job satisfaction and which factors are more significant compared with traditional situation, structural equation modeling and multiple regression analysis will be considered as main data analysis methods, depending on the amount of data collected.